


Freckles and Baby Fever

by kiaronna



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Baby Animals, Domestic Fluff, Engagement, F/M, Insecurity, baby beasts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-09
Updated: 2017-03-09
Packaged: 2018-10-01 11:39:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10189124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiaronna/pseuds/kiaronna
Summary: “No, no, I’d be terrible at children,” Newt Scamander insists. “I wouldn’t raise them right.”She blinks disbelievingly at him. “You’re telling me you can raise any type of magical creature except a human being?”Newt tries very hard not to admit how much he wants a baby. Tina retaliates by tenderly mothering every beast in his suitcase.





	

 They’re running from a domesticated but angry thestral down an empty street in the city, holding hands, when Tina slows.

“Ah, Tina-“ he looks down, like perhaps she’s twisted her ankle and he’ll have to lankily swing her up into his arms, but she seems completely fine. Her eyes are just glued to a store display; pastel baby bonnets, a crib, No-Maj still pictures of chubby-cheeked babies. “Tina,” he reminds her gently, “we’re running away?”

“Right!” She jerks her gaze forward again, gives him a nervous smile, and then they’re running towards the butcher’s. Nothing like some raw meat to calm a thestral, really.

* * *

 

She makes him hot chocolate that evening. He sniffs at the decadent steaming cocoa suspiciously. Tina is generous, this much is true. Since they were engaged just a month prior, Tina’s only become impossibly more giving, _for_ giving of Newt’s awkwardness and mistakes, and less stiff.

“Did I do something wrong?” He asks. This is always a safe question. “Do we need to have a… discussion?”

“W-what?” Tina fidgets with her dark hair, eyes darting between his face and the fireplace of the tiny apartment that she now inhabits alone. “Oh, Newt. No. Nothing’s wrong. I was just… wondering.”

He blinks. Sets the cocoa cup down. “Yes?”

“What do you think about children?” She blurts. Her cheeks are pink, her lip trembling. The dinner dishes, which had been washing themselves in the sink, clatter suddenly. His fiancée is, without a doubt, his favorite magical creature. Coming back to New York to court her (and to track down a wizard who had separated a beast from her young) had been one of the best decisions of his life. “Newt,” she interrupts his thoughts quietly, voice tight. “Children?”

He takes a sip of the cocoa. It burns his tongue.

“I don’t want any.”

* * *

 

Queenie and Jacob join them for dinner at Newt’s apartment, months later, and Jacob has to laughingly point out the shimmering line of glitter that runs in a strip from Newt’s forehead to his neck.

“What caused that?”

“You don’t want to know,” Tina says with a shake of her head. But Jacob does. After dinner, she and Jacob stand before the suitcase, her smile widening. “Oh, and the mooncalves just had birthing season, too. You can see the babies.”

“Are they hard to handle?”

“Harder than the adults,” she laughs, “but Newt’s a dear with them.” Her gaze on him is warm, so warm, and it curls Newt’s toes in his worn down shoes.

Queenie snags his sleeve before Newt can follow them into the suitcase. “You see mooncalves all the time, sugar. Why don’t you let them be and drink a cuppa with me?”

He squints at the beautiful blonde through the steam, wonders why the sisters always feel the need to ply men with warm drinks before serious conversations.

“So,” she hums, “after you get married, it won’t be long until I have some nephews or nieces running about, huh?”

Newt stares resolutely into his cup. His too big nose and freckles stare back at him. “I don’t want children,” he replies abruptly, tonelessly.

“That’d be perfectly all right, honey, but it’s just not true.” She sighs. “I’m sorry, by the way.”

“You already read my mind,” Newt mutters. “No use in apologizing now. I know it wasn’t on purpose.”

“Tina wants kids.” Queenie stirs her drink with a delicate swirl of her finger. “She wants _your_ kids.”

His throat tightens. “I know.”

“You should tell her why,” Queenie urges sweetly.

“You tell her, please.”

“I can’t put your feelings into words, honey, that’s not the way it works.” She pats his hand, gives him a tiny and sleepy smile. “Just talk to her. Things will be all right.”

* * *

 

It has been another month, and Newt has not talked to her.

He has stared at her, eyes wide and pupils dilated, as she feeds the newborn Golden Snidget with droplets from the end of her wand. Her fingers trace gently over its back and wings as it trills; Newt knows how gentle she must be, because Golden Snidgets are fragile as paper, especially the babies. He wants those fingers on him, ghosting over the skin on his chest, lower—

“Newt,” she says, noticing him, the smile that’s already on her face blooming impossibly larger. “You’re home.”

He sneaks up, like she’s a shy beast that’s going to flee, and presses a chaste kiss to her lips. “I’m home,” he agrees.

* * *

 

Infant mooncalves like two things best: running through fields, and licking. Despite the size of their eyes, taste seems to be all important.

Next on the list of things mooncalves like is cow milk, and peanut butter.

Tina’s drenched and layered in both. Newt had eagerly helped her slather it on when he realized the potential behavioral patterns he could observe. Now she’s lying in a field, arms out, tongues tickling at her forearms and the backs of her knees while she giggles.

“I love them,” she breathes when she is (mostly) licked clean and Newt hauls her back up to her feet. She nuzzles into his shoulder, sigh content, and he presses a kiss to her smooth cheek. Everything smells faintly of peanut butter and the sweet herbs the babies like to nibble on. “That looked stupid, didn’t it,” she mumbles into his shoulder. He startles. The thought hadn’t occurred to him; he’d been too busy being pleased with the situation.

“Never,” he assures. “Never, Tina.”

* * *

 

Her division of MACUSA has an office party. He can’t go because the Niffler decided it wanted to rob a museum display of old jewels, and he’s stuck chasing it down and cleaning up the mess.

Tina comes home tipsy. He knows, because she’s not too self-conscious to dance, spinning around his living room and humming off-key. Newt tries to dance with her. She drunkenly elbows him in the face during a twirl, and he steps on her feet.

“I love you,” she tells him, shyly and quietly, as he tucks her in and brushes his knuckles against her cheek. “I love you so much.”

In the morning, when she is sleepily stirring her tea, he says: “Maybe we shouldn’t get married.”

She drops her mug. He fumbles for it, but drops it too, and it shatters on the floor, the bitter scent of coffee steaming through the apartment. Her eyes are not filled with tears, because Tina hates crying.

“Why?”

“You want kids.”

Her facial expression, so raw, tightens and hardens. A dragon scale moving into pubescence from the downy soft scales of childhood, he thinks.

“I want you,” she corrects. “I haven’t—I haven’t brought it up since we first talked about it. I respected what you wanted.” Her bottom lip quivers. “Why would you bring it up again?”

He runs a hand through his red hair, then gestures with it helplessly. “You just… and I… right.” He swallows nervously. “Tina. Look at me.” She does, eyes scanning over him critically. “I can’t be a father.”

“I think you’d be a wonderful father.”

“No, no, I’d be terrible at children,” Newt insists, almost desperate. “I wouldn’t raise them right.”

She blinks disbelievingly at him. “You’re telling me you can raise _any type of magical creature_ except a human being?”

“Well,” he says awkwardly, “yes.” He tightens his fists until his fingernails are cutting half-moons into his palms. “And… if they were mine… they’d be bullied, Tina. They’d be—strange. Odd. Raised with herds of magical beasts, too. Like some kind of… magical Tarzan.” This, at least, is a book that has pervaded wizard culture. “Or at least that’s what everyone’s told me when they thought about me having kids. My brother used to say he couldn’t imagine another me running around, causing chaos and explosions.”

Tina is squinting at him. “Newt,” she says, very softly.

He’s on a roll, now. He can’t stop. “I know they’d be half you, so they’d likely be better than me, but still. All the girls in my class used to run from me in the halls, say—say if I went on a date with someone or had sex I’d get them pregnant with a beast.” He flushes, tries to remember that Tina already _knows_ his school years were rough, that he wasn’t loved by anyone except someone equally screwed up in the head. “They’d have freckles and social anxiety and wouldn’t be able to talk to other humans and would be very, very lonely—“

“Newt,” she repeats, gently. “Newt, would you like some cocoa?”

Five minutes later, he sips at it, resigned. Tina’s made herself a new mug of tea, hands shaking.

“So,” he mutters, “are we cancelling the wedding?”

She sets the tea mug on the counter, fiercely yanks the chair opposite him out from the table, and primly throws herself into it, making eye contact with him. Newt’s never been good at eye contact. This is fine with most magical creatures, who often view prolonged eye contact as aggression—except perhaps hippogriffs. He’s always had trouble with hippogriffs.

“No.” She takes a deep breath. “Your children may be awkward, Newt. They’d be raised by, well, us. But they wouldn’t be lonely. We’d love them very, very much, and so would the hundreds of creatures you have in your suitcase. I think they’d be happy, Newt, because _we’re_ happy, aren’t we?”

He nods wordlessly. Watches his finger trace a mating dance pattern into the wood of his table.

“I’d love them so much, because they’d have pieces of you in them. They’d be raised to be gentle, and compassionate, and brave, and ridiculously stubborn when it came to doing the right thing.” Tina hates crying. Newt can’t help but do it, sometimes. “Don’t you—don’t you _ever_ think that this world isn’t better for you being in it.”

“Okay,” he croaks out, and she stares at him from across the table. He takes a breath. “Let’s raise children, Porpentina.”

Last week, he’d asked if she wanted to raise Chizpurfles in their kitchen. Her response had been immediate and incredulous rejection.

This reaction is the opposite of that.

They end up kissing on top of the breakfast table. Newt wonders how he could’ve woken up this morning bracing himself to never marry her. Then, Newt doesn’t have the brainpower to devote to thinking about much of anything, except his fiancée’s lips dancing on his.

* * *

 

“How’s the baby?” Jacob asks, politely, on their scheduled date night. The Scamanders’ four-month old is at home, with a very capable babysitter from MACUSA. Newt gestures for Tina to pass him her purse, and she concedes with a sigh.

From the purse comes a large volume, with scribbles all over it.

“What,” Jacob says.

Newt flings open the cover. “She likes being fed a snack at 3pm, but _only_ if the milk is lukewarm. She’s passing all of her benchmarks. The other day she giggled and gestured with her hand and knocked a painting off the wall, so I think she’s above average in terms of her natural magic abilities—“

“Slow down, sugar,” Queenie inputs gently.

“I thought he was bad when I was pregnant,” Tina mutters. “He _weighed_ me. And measured my waist every day.”

“Behaviorally I find her to be most similar to a—“

“All right,” Jacob interrupts. “How about we save this for after dinner.”

Newt wilts slightly. Tina presses a kiss to his cheek.

They walk home under the streetlights back to their apartment, hands linked. The baby is asleep, sweet and soft and smelling of powder, in her crib. Tina makes him cocoa, and they curl on the couch to watch an episode of No-Maj television while they doze off.

Tina isn’t paying much attention to the show. Her eyes are on his face, his freckles and hair that stands straight up and the way his fingers are tapping with nervous energy on his knee.

“I love you,” she says affectionately, gently, “I love you so much.”

Newt believes her.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!  
> And thanks for tolerating the liberties I took with infant magical creatures. I assumed they'd like peanut butter because almost everything does.


End file.
